Λ (Lambda) is an artist book by Micol Assaël which collects a series of 72 drawings made by the artist starting in 2011 as a reflection on light.
The work well exemplifies Assaël’s interest in natural phenomena and in their unpredictability which often makes it impossible for the artist to control the work. The drawings “describe” biomorphic figures inscribed within circles, and are based on the attempt to define a blot of color despite its constant modification over time. Unlike previous series of drawings, Λ (Lambda) is made with orange enamel and blue ink.
The drawings, conceived to be charged with light, have been exposed to direct, very intense sources of illumination. The title Λ (Lambda) alludes to the symbol used in physics for the wavelength of light.
Motto is very excited to announce that Mizna Publications are now available as part of our catalogue.
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Mission
Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production, centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than twenty years, we have been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.
Named City Page’s Nonprofit of the Year in 2020 and a Regional Cultural Treasure in 2021, we publish Mizna, an award-winning SWANA lit and art journal; produce the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest running Arab film fest in the Midwest; and offer classes, readings, performances, public art, and community events, having featured over 400 local and global writers, filmmakers, and artists.
Vision
Mizna seeks to be a local, national, and international leader in providing excellent artistic platforms for emerging and established SWANA artists, connecting their work to engaged and thoughtful audiences.
Through Mizna, audiences have the opportunity to engage in the work of Arab and Muslim artists on its own terms. And our community has a critical opportunity to see some facet of their own experience reflected on the page or the screen.
History
Mizna was co-founded as a grassroots organization by Kathryn Haddad and Saleh Abudayyeh who identified a need for an artistic space dedicated to Arab and Muslim writers to narrate their own stories and make work on their own terms. Along with a small group of other Arab and Muslim writers, artists, and scholars, Kathy and Saleh established Mizna during vibrant time in the ‘90s when Asian and black Twin Cities artists and activists were creating collectives and working together to imagine a more socially just and representative arts scene.
Le Livre Art Publishing is proud to announce the upcoming release of Julio Le Parc, the most comprehensive monograph to date on revered Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc. Following Le Parc’s prolific and visionary body of work, this extensive 492 page volume takes a deeper look into the intellectual and creative process of the artist.
Featuring a critical anthology dating back to 1967, an opening essay by Jean de Loisy, an entire section dedicated to Julio Le Parc’s writings and over 600 color plates, this monograph takes us on a journey through the innovative and ground-breaking work of the artist, thus surveying the pivotal « Before Paris » era before diving into the Surfaces and Color Surfaces periods, and continuing its exploration with Contortions, Light, Installations, Games, Alchemies, and Le Parc’s Virtual Museum.
An in-depth photo-biography of the artist further deepens our understanding of Le Parc’s portrayal, along with an anthology of texts by Mario Benedetti, Alberto Biasi, Jorge Romero Brest, Jean Clay, Gérard Fromanger, Julián Gállego, François Morellet, Pablo Neruda, Jean-Louis Pradel, Paco Rabanne, Pierre Restany, and Julio Le Parc.
Modernism/Murderism, translated by Vasvi Oza, brings together, for the first time in English, a forgotten debate on Modern Art that took place in the pages of the Gujarati-language periodical Kumar between 1959 and 1964. Published across various issues, the debate brings into conversation Pherozeshah Rustomji Mehta, a writer and art connoisseur from Karachi, and Jyoti Bhatt, a young artist who had just begun teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda. While Mehta chose to defend what he believed were the timeless and traditional values of art, Bhatt proposed that Modern Art was no stranger to these values and in fact had much in common with them. Alongside the articles by Mehta and Bhatt, the publication also brings together responses to the debate from various readers who interjected in the ‘Readers Write’ column of the periodical, as well as notes from Kumar‘s editor, Bachubhai Ravat, who informally acted as a mediator. Offering a vantage point from which to view the entry of Modernism and its affiliated discourses into the art practices of the region, this volume proposes itself as a reader to these histories and revisits this crucial moment.
“The soft invisible weight of your absence takes so much space” is a zine and an installation compiling photographs, paintings, prints, fabrics, visual poems, and texts exploring and diving in the themes of absence and grief.
Delving into what seems insignificant at first, such as unreadable notes, blurry photos, missed shots and faceless portraits, Aimé threads different multi-layered attempts to grasp the space that remains where absence begins. Haunted by the influence of writers such as Marguerite Duras, Sarah Kane, Jean Luc Lagarce and Fabrice Melquiot, they explore the different feelings tied to absence and grief relating to the concepts of identity, gender, relationships, family, the body and collective imaginaries. The result is visions of paradoxes, in-betweens and nonplaces, suspended outside of time and space, flying out of a stranger’s hands.
A leading voice in Lebanon’s cultural diaspora, Rabih Mroué’s acclaimed body of work addresses the contested memory of historical events that include the Lebanese civil war, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian Revolution. Spanning theater, art, and literature, his diverse oeuvre is situated at the intersection of personal and political imaginaries, media critique, and concepts of authorship: Through scripted conversations, confessions, reports, and questions, Mroué ceaselessly interrogates ways of speaking.
Published to coincide with his major solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, marking his receipt of the 2020 Schering Award for Artistic Research, this anthology of interviews frames the past 20 years of Mroué’s practice. Additionally, a suite of newly commissioned interviews and an introductory essay by the curator Nadim Samman draw a portrait of the artist.
A Female Gaze explores the paintings and drawings of contemporary artist Caroline Walker through the lens of Laura Knight, arguably Nottingham’s most famous artist and the first woman to be elected a Royal Academian.
Seperated by 100 years, both artists are united through their observations of women in everyday life, from moments of motherhood to women at work and the mundanity of domestic life.
With essays by Jennifer Higgie and Tristram Aver, this book contributes to rebalancing the gender bias legacy within art history, while celebrating the powerful artistic qualities of two extraordinary painters.
This book was published to accompany a major Nottingham Castle Trust exhibition, ‘Laura Knight and Caroline Walker: A Female Gaze.
Flowers collectively: The bloom of the cherry tree. State of having the buds opened: The gardens are all in bloom.
A flourishing, prospering condition.
To bloom, blooming, bloomed. What does “bloom” mean to you?
BLOSSOM is the accumulation of work from 30 artists from around the world who were asked what the word “bloom” means for them.
1/3 of revenues earned from BLOSSOM will be donated to @REDCOMUNITARIATRANS, a community-based organization led by transgender women that work to defend the rights of trans people in Colombia. During the last six years, they have worked hand in hand with trans women who are victims of the armed conflict, deprived of liberty, homeless people, sex workers and drug users.
When starting to work on the 25th issue of our magazine, we were discussing whether there should be some sort of content to celebrate this milestone and the past ten years leading up to it. But, as further reading will indicate, there are no texts praising past issues or reflections on the musical developments we documented over the years. However, the anniversary helps in presenting the underlying theme of this issue. As loyal readers might know, zweikommasieben started out as a fanzine and aspired to keep this character somewhat alive. Therefore, in zweikommasieben #25, we would like to reflect on various aspects of what fandom entails.
As fans, the authors, editors, and photographers of this magazine are dependent on artists — niche or mainstream — to be willing to have their practice documented. To put it bluntly: if they don’t want to speak to us, there is not much we can do. Likewise, and without overestimating the impact of our small publication, it might have positive consequences for artists to be featured in zweikommasieben, which is not simply a unidirectional channel between fans and artists: over the years some artists highlighted their own fandom, interviewing other artists they admire for this very magazine, while some contributors developed artistic practices which led them to having fans on their own.
Such an ever-changing web of dependencies is highlighted on the following pages. This edition features a text by media theorist and artist DeForrest Brown Jr. dedicated to the multiple talents of singer-songwriter Dawn Richard: an exploration of why fans could be drawn to her practice over the past 15 years. Jasmin Hoek visits a new museum in Amsterdam that is dedicated to techno and club culture to investigate whether such an institution can be true to something we all have been fans of. In Anna Froelicher’s interview with Price, the artist elaborates on how he plays with both institutions’ and fans’ conceptualization of his music. The complexities of being a fan not only relate to other people and institutions but also to oneself and one’s personal development. In a new essay, Friedemann Dupelius uses his ever-evolving fascination with trance to reflect on the genre’s current status quo.
